What I'm Reading
Finished
Wake
by Robert Sawyer.
Somewhat old-school SF bringing an old idea up to date.
The human elements are a bit perfunctory, with the blind high-school heroine
never quite convincing. The ideas and science side are great though.
The idea of a computer network accidentally gaining sentience
has been raised in a waffly way many times, but never in such a plausible
way, with lots of good information science details.

Worth reading if you like high-concept SF, but the protagonist could be
a bit irritating if you need well-rounded characters and relationships
in your fiction.

What I'm Watching
Saw the movie
Carnage
at home.
Adaption of a stage play where two New York couples meet
to discuss an incident where their children fought,
and the initial brittle calm descends into furious
emotional battles.

Pretty good movie. Very funny in places, and with great
performances, especially from Jodie Foster. The characters
are deliberately a little obnoxious, but not totally unsympathetic.

Weaknesses: feels pretty stage-bound, makes no attempt to leave the one
set. Also the ending didn't really seem apocalyptic enough.

I'm not exactly sure what PPP dollars are, but having the log of income in those units be 9.5 for Americans is Just Wrong. The median income is not, and never has been 3 billion dollars a year; neither has it (on the assumption that they mean natural logs) been $13,000 for a very long time.

When they get the graphs beaten into plausible shape, I'll listen to the argument.

I now know what the noise that is usually spelled "lolwhut" sounds like. --Kellnerin

Is Purchasing Power Parity, which lets you compare living standards across different nations, by adjusting the dollar values for how much stuff you can buy at each country's prices.--It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

They're pretty respectable figures. Dani Rodrik is a leading development economist who I've been following for years, his source is this guy.

The point isn't the scale, the point is the shape. Because the Dutch S-curve is so much shallower, the poorest Dutch earners are better off than the poorest Americans, while the richest Americans are better off than the richest Dutch.
That would be obscured if you only look at mean or median incomes, but didn't look at the distributions.--It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

that none of the numbers on any of the charts that have units of money make any sense whatsoever. So how can I blindly trust that the shape of the curves has any verisimilitude?? I'd love to have an income of 30 billion a year.

I now know what the noise that is usually spelled "lolwhut" sounds like. --Kellnerin

I expect the dollars and Euros are adjusted for inflation to an arbitrary year in the past. The dollar a day poverty line uses 1993 as a reference year, but this could be a different year altogether.--It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

in the article you cite, "2004 PPP-adjusted dollars". So unless they're adjusting to 1936 or something (and using natural logarithms, cleverly forgetting to note that fact), still: nonsense.

I also note that he says in the text that the lowest 5% (in the 2nd chart) have nearly twice the income in the Netherlands vs. the US; reading the chart we get 7.5 (US) and 8.5 (NL), so one unit is a factor of two, which would mean base 2 logarithms, and the median income (again the mystical 9.5) would be 2^9.5 = 724 "2004 PPP-adjusted dollars".

Nonsense.

I now know what the noise that is usually spelled "lolwhut" sounds like. --Kellnerin

Which is a comparison of the US and China. He doesn't state what the unit is for the second graph of the US and the Netherlands.--It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

is a little sketchy on Sweden. Surely an important point is that since their banking system was already in better shape (thanks to the earlier crisis) and had better plans for dealing with this crisis (actually nationalising banks and liquidating shareholders and giving bondholders huge haircuts) then they currently have a working credit system - which enables their high end industries to keep growing and exporting.

It's also odd how different his conclusions on delay are from the author's of the report he quotes to back himself up:

The good news is that, in the long run, in our model at least, it does all wash out; whatever the path of consolidation, the economy eventually returns to long-run equilibrium. What this analysis shows is that the economic pain resulting from fiscal consolidation could not have been avoided, but could have been substantially reduced. The standard policy prescription – to delay deficit reduction until after recovery is clearly under way and the output shortfall significantly reduced – remains valid.

And what they don't say is that the bad news is that in the real world it doesn't all wash out because of the hysteresis effects in unemployment. We're busy losing a large part of a generation from productive lives.

Mr Smith believes in an urgency of deficit cutting that has been disproven by Britain's own history, by Japan in recent years and even by the experiences of fast growing economies like South Korea prior to the IMF intervention. He's not grounded in empirical observation.

Yes but its not really a joking matter is it? by dmg (2.00 / 0) #13Wed Aug 15, 2012 at 06:41:10 AM EST

You may or may not enjoy fisting/being fisted but it's not illegal between consenting adults. People have a right to a private sex life even if it is a bit unconventional.--dmg - HuSi's most dimwitted overprivileged user.

but hopefully, after getting this thrown out of court, they will stop prosecuting on this stupid law.

The sinister aspect is that this guy's job was prosecuting bent coppers. And suddenly they raid him for dodgy porn - including one unsolicited, unread mail in his inbox (fnar) alleged to feature someone underage (it wasn't).

There were those in the economics field that called that out at the time, but weren't listened to. The politicians wanted to engage in autsterity and listened to the economists who gave them the information they wanted. It's the same in business circles.

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